freedom

Post navigation

There’s a selfish, hopeless yearning in some of us for the end of the world. It’s the ultimate get out of jail free card. Life hurtling off the rails? Debts you can’t pay? Pain you can’t fix? Just hold on for the asteroid or the zombie apocalypse or the next emerging virus and catch the last train to nowhere with everyone else. You’re all leaving the party at the same time and any shameful secrets dropped behind the furniture or hidden in the back of a cupboard in the kitchen are going to be blowing down the road as ash or dust with nobody to ever give a toss left around to see. The end of the world gives us all a noble – even if terrifying and painful, as most ends are – and personally blameless death. Nobody surviving to mourn our loved ones or piss on the graves of our enemies. All our accounts settled, simultaneously. Maybe God walks among us now, dismantling our petty lives and freeing us from this earth. We seem to be sliding backwards, into not just moral but intellectual decay. Our great conversations are increasingly being had by the loudest monkeys in the zoo and the rest of us are flinging shit and jumping up and down hooting with our fingers in our ears. Maybe we’ve all just run out of steam. We’re decommissioning words and growing increasingly afraid of the ones we’ve got left, so afraid we can’t refer to them by name for fear that the very SOUND of the word may inflict literal pain in the hearts and minds of a species that once killed fucking mammoths with twigs. We’re hiding in our caves terrified of words and the ideas that they might provoke. We don’t want to think anymore. We’ve had enough of thinking now. Enough with the fucking thinking already. What we want is anaesthesia. We want to forget what we know. We’ve lost any genuine enthusiasm for going forward so we’ve just sat down in the road and we’re going to forget how to talk and think and just dream up ever more crazy ways to fuck each other and film it and fill the internet up with people fucking each other in ever more crazy ways and we’ll all have genital chafing and thousand yard stares from the constant dry heaving of the dopamine pump as the fireball roars into the ocean or the latest pandemic spreads like creepy mycelium around the globe and we won’t care because it’ll mean freedom from our shitty jobs, freedom from our shitty species, freedom from having to take our library books back or pay our council tax – freedom, brothers and sisters, from the tyranny of life…